I hate the game UpWords. I hate it with a passion. I hate it the way I’ve never hated anything before. I hate it as much as I love Scrabble – and I reaaaaaaly love Scrabble.

It’s a completely irrational hatred.

On the surface, the two games are similar, you have tiles with letters, and you make words, but Scrabble is all about using your vocabulary to create obscure words with the seven tiles given. There are blanks. There are double and triple word scores. There is some TALENT involved. UpWords is Scrabble’s white trash cousin. Instead of expanding the board by making new words, you stack tiles to manipulate existing ones. There are no blank tiles. And you can ONLY use Q in combination with U.

My husband, the one who can’t spell, loves UpWords.

My parents, who are actually decent Scrabble players, love UpWords.

So, I guess I’m just a snob. A snob with enough of a Scrabble-induced guilt complex that I cannot stack letters because it feels like cheating.

Also, the average word is only four letters long, which is NOT terribly interesting. In fact, four letter words almost never appear in our Scrabble games, unless they’re words like “qaid” and “vole,” words that aren’t likely to be seen in an UpWords game. (In fact, it’s impossible to include “quaid” in an UpWords game, because of the Qu tile instead of just a Q tile. Hmph!)

My family thinks I dislike UpWords because I don’t always win it. This is not true. I recognize that not all of game playing is about winning. Indeed, I enjoy Phase 10 – and Scrabble – whether I win at them or not – but no matter what the score, I detest UpWords.